


Perchance to Dream

by wavewright62



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Alternate Universe, Corporate Culture Makes an Apocalypse More Enticing, Gen, Maybe Not an AU After All, Mystery, Year 0 (Stand Still Stay Silent)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 07:17:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11732193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wavewright62/pseuds/wavewright62
Summary: Mr-Plinkett suggested in the Disqus comments that perhaps all of SSSS was all Lalli's dream.  Maybe it was, Mr-Plinkett, maybe it was.  Then Lalli woke up and went to work as an engineer at Nokia.





	Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mr-Plinkett](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Mr-Plinkett).



> This will also serve as my entry for P in the SSSS Alphabet Challenge.

Lalli laced up his running shoes and padded silently through the lounge in the pre-dawn darkness. He could hear Yousuf snoring in his room, but Chen was out here. He was fast asleep on the sofa, glasses askew, laptop open on his lap, headphones on. Lalli went to close the laptop, but thought the better of it when he saw screeds of code still running down the screen. Chen would have started the compiling and then fallen asleep monitoring it. Best to leave it.

He pulled the merino beanie over his ears as he left the apartment building and started a slow lope down the street, his breath dissipating in rivulets in the cold. The low-hanging mists hung over the buildings and the trees by the river, making the buildings look half-burnt out and ruined. It reminded Lalli of that weird dream he’d just woken up from, cruising down past Nokia on the river on his way to this expedition.

He’d dreamt that he was on an expedition to Denmark. Some kind of plague known as the Rash had wiped out most of the human and animal population of the planet, and left just a tiny scattered number of people throughout Scandinavia. Lalli was immune, and some other people were too, but lots of others weren’t and wore masks or never left the safe areas. Also, some of the people and animals who got the Rash didn’t die but got twisted into deadly grosslings.

He didn’t know anybody on this expedition to Denmark, except his cousins Tuuri and Onni. He hadn’t seen them in years, since he was a little kid, but they were all grown up in this dream. No, wait, he remembered, Onni wasn’t on the expedition, he was somewhere else, he was with the people who were sending them on the expedition. Lalli was warmed up and striding well now; he was a scout in his dream, and had to run all night long exploring spooky post-apocalyptic Denmark, that much was the same. None of the other people in the dream could speak Finnish, and Tuuri had to translate. Why didn’t they just speak English or something, like Lalli did with Chen and Yousuf and everybody else in the engineering team at work? It would have made things an awful lot easier. But he supposed that all the English-speaking countries were wiped out and they stopped teaching it in school after that, maybe.

Lalli veered away from the river on his loop back toward home, and realised with a wry smile that he was vaguely keeping an eye out for places that might contain books. The expedition was looking for books. Not technology, not food, not gold or precious artefacts, _books._ Weird. Most of the books were, predictably enough, crumbling, and had to be copied out by hand. The internet was wiped out too.

But somehow they still had film photography, because Lalli remembered finding a book in the dream that had photographs stuck into it. Dreams were funny that way, because the pictures would ordinarily be taken digitally and stored on a database, but in the dream they’d somehow used film. Lalli ran on, trying to figure out where in the middle of the apocalypse they found a place that would still be available to develop film. He gave up, chalking it up to ‘weird dream logic that made sense at the time.’

At one point in the dream, they all went out onto a wharf and dragged in a box that had this guy in it, a lanky guy with long red hair that he wore in a plait down his back, who liked to bug Lalli about magic.

Lalli huffed into the cold air, making a big spray of his breath, as he remembered that part of his dream (it was unbelievably detailed, and he just kept remembering more and more bits of detail). Lalli could do _magic_ in this dream, although he couldn’t cure the Rash or anything like that. But real magic, like summoning his lynx luonto to fight grosslings. That was okay. He wished he could summon his luonto to do things he hated, like going to workflow meetings. Mrrrh.

Lalli was on the last kilometre from home, and the light was only just beginning to touch the eastern horizon. Real sunrise wouldn’t happen until after Lalli got to work, but he didn’t mind running in the dark. He remembered performing kallohonka on a dog, in the rain, and freaking out Emil. Who was this Emil? Lalli had the feeling he’d met him somewhere before, but couldn’t quite place where. Right before Lalli woke up, he dreamed he was in a battle with ghosts and trolls and things, and he made the red-haired guy draw runes to burn some of them. But then it all got crazy and the goddess Kokko came flying out of this Emil’s flamethrower and burned all the enemies like in a game, and that was when Lalli’s alarm went off and woke him up. He couldn’t remember why he woke up feeling sad.

Back in the apartment, Chen had woken up and put the laptop on the charger. Somebody was in the shower. While Lalli wasn’t happy about having to wait for his own shower, he was very glad he didn’t have to decontaminate himself in a tub of cold water like in his dream! He turned on the radio, and Esko’s chatter filled the kitchen. Too early for chatter – Lalli turned off the radio.

He set up his breakfast – a cup of espresso grind coffee. They didn’t have coffee either, in his dream, and yet somehow, he didn’t die from its lack. Maybe the magic had something to do with it. He lived on gruel, yuck, and the odd bit he managed to scrounge. But the cook sometimes had cookies, really nice cookies, for some reason? He rummaged in the cupboards to see if they had any cookies. All he had was coffee, an untouched jar of mango chutney he’d gotten as a secret Santa gift at work, and a jar of rollmops. Then he spied that Yousuf had some in his supply. Maybe Lalli could sneak one? He peered around stealthily to see if anyone was around. The door to the bathroom opened with a puff of steam, Yousuf called out gruffly, “Next!,” and then with his voice receding as he walked back to his room, “Lalli, leave my biscuits alone. Buy your own for once.” Lalli put the cookies back with a pout, and then quickly scrambled back to the bathroom, just beating out Chen, who swore at him in Mandarin.

Later, as he walked into the Nokia headquarters, Lalli had the oddest feeling that there should have been cats patrolling for security. Instead there was just a bored-looking young man with a mohawk haircut who didn’t look up as Lalli swiped through his access card.

Lalli booted up his computer, and asked Ilkka at the next desk, “So, if a plague infected something like 99% of the Earth’s mammal population, and 1% of those didn’t die but were instead turned into undead trolls, do you think the old gods would gift magic to the rest?”

Ilkka didn’t even look up from the screen. “You _still_ wouldn’t get a date, Lalli.”

“Mmrrhh.” Lalli walked over to the kitchenette and set up a coffee for himself.

Ilkka finished typing and hit ‘enter’ on his keyboard. He called over to Lalli, “What movie was that from?”

“Movie? No, a dream I had. It was …it was a weird dream, is all,” Lalli sat down with his coffee. He swore to himself when he saw his calendar notifications. A meeting on _corporate culture_ ; why did he have to attend _that?_ He barely even recognised the other names on the email.

He continued scrolling through his emails as he sipped his coffee, but his mind was elsewhere, mulling over a whole society without computers, without mobile devices, without virtual reality platforms and corporate culture meetings, without coffee, without a common language, without chattering radio hosts, blown back to a preindustrial era by an epidemic. Did he like that life better than this one? Simpler, yes, but in constant peril, not so much. Also, no coffee – a solid no.

“You could get Minna Sundberg to draw that,” Ilkka interrupted his thoughts.

“What?” Lalli came back to the present.

“She’s a webcomic artist, she draws ‘A Redtail’s Dream,’ I told you about that one,” Ilkka went on, “with the old Finnish mythology in it. Sort of like your dream.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lalli remembered Ilkka had sent him a link at one point. He had taken a quick look then, and resolved to come back and read, but he didn’t like to do non-work tasks when he was at work, and preferred to keep away from computers when he was home. Someday. With a sigh, he reluctantly went off to his meeting.

The meeting room was set up with chairs in rows facing the whiteboard, and Lalli chose a seat as far back as he could, pulling the chair further away from the rest in the row. As he sat and waited for the meeting to begin, he was distracted by the long red plait hanging down the back of one of the chairs in the front row. It belonged to a thin freckled young woman, wearing a sky-blue sweater knitted with a pattern of diamonds around the yoke. He found himself agitated enough to lean over to the next person and ask who the plait belonged to. The person looked askance at Lalli for speaking to a stranger, but answered, “Rauni Something. New intern. Marketing.” Lalli settled back into his seat and mulled over the coincidence of that girl, so like the young man in his dream. Weird.

The meeting facilitator introduced the day’s guest speaker, an American communications consultant analysing Nokia’s corporate culture. Lalli was already mostly zoned out already, thinking about how to resolve an error he was getting in his code, but almost fell out of his chair when the consultant strode in. She was very tall, dressed in a white pants suit and stiletto heels that made her look even taller, and red hair too bright to be natural falling into a flip just above her shoulders. She crushed the facilitator’s hand in a firm handshake, and then turned a brilliant smile to the meeting participants. Lalli could only just tell she was speaking English, but because she was speaking very rapidly and not about engineering or code, he couldn’t really understand much of what she said. She very helpfully wrote some words on the whiteboard as she spoke: “C.J. Eide,” “Corporate Culture,” “Dominance,” “Vision,” “Global Marketplace.” She occasionally made some sort of joke with the facilitator, giving his shoulder a punch as she did so. He was edging further and further away as the presentation went on, but the hapless man always seemed to be within arm’s reach when the American had a point to make. Lalli watched her pace around the room, mesmerised by the red soles on her shoes, so unlike the practical boots he expected her to wear. How could it be, that troll hunter Sigrun from his dream was here?

When the session broke for lunch, Lalli got some meat and gravy from the buffet table and chose a seat in a corner where no one was sitting, but to his annoyance was soon joined by two people. The annoyance turned to horror when the plate set across from him belonged to the young marketing intern with the long red plait, who smiled at him shyly but didn’t talk to him. Then he was distracted by the enticing aroma of the dish placed next to him and stole a look at the other person, hoping fervently that the person didn’t see him look and consider that an opening for conversation. The person had spilled something onto himself and hissed at himself as he rubbed at the spot with a serviette. Lalli’s mouth fell open and he forgot all manners when he saw the young man’s straight nose and his thick blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be, he said to himself. The sticky paper nametag affixed to his shirt said ‘Emil Soderström’ in large printed letters. Emil caught Lalli staring, blushed and apologised in accented English. Lalli didn’t really have an ear for accents, but could convince himself it was a Swedish accent. Rauni kept her eyes downcast onto her plate, eating politely.

Lalli got up without excusing himself and stalked back to his desk to pick up his things. He had to get out. Ilkka gave him a look, then said with a snort, “I had that session last week, all about The Nokia Way, the Finnish way.” Lalli didn’t answer him. The Finnish way would have been nice, but that wasn’t the session he had. He logged off his computer, got his coat, and got to the door as quickly as he could.

His heart was hammering as he left the building. Naturally, it was raining, but that didn’t bother him much. Not knowing where else to go, he started walking home, but then spied a bus that would pass his building waiting at the bus stop. He jogged up to it lightly and started climbing the steps, but stopped short when the bus driver turned and looked at him, a steady gaze of grey eyes set under bushy eyebrows and long wavy sandy hair. He had the most impressive set of sideburns Lalli had seen since...

He turned and sprinted off the bus and back to his apartment building. There was a stray cat he’d never seen before sitting on the stoop, white with ginger patches. Lalli couldn’t get inside fast enough, and he dove into his bed, wet shoes and all, and pulled the covers over his head, panting as he waited in vain for his heartrate to slow.

After a while, he realised he could hear coughing coming from inside the apartment. Leaving the bed, he went back to the foyer to take his shoes off. Yousuf padded out of his room, blowing his nose, and boiled the jug for some tea. “What are you doing home, Lalli? Are you sick too?” He took a box down from his portion of the cupboard. “Eh, good Tunisian tea, just the thing. I think I confused the sniffer dog in Customs when I came back from Tunisia last week, I had so many spices and packets of tea in my luggage.” He scratched the side of his neck and sniffed. “Too bad I also brought back that flu the rest of my family was getting when I left, eh.”

Lalli couldn’t tear his eyes away. On Yousuf’s neck was a livid red rash.

**Author's Note:**

> Rod Serling, call your office.
> 
> I would say Emil was very nearly named Soderström in canon - in the series of 'photographs' in the Prologue 'officially' documenting Year 0, there was a photo of Ulrika & Stig & their family taping up their cabin, labelled 'Soderström Family.' It's still there as at this writing, on pg. 46.


End file.
